Page 1 of First Dates and Birthday Cakes: MM Romantic Comedy

Somewhere outside my bedroom window, a thrush greeted the dawn with a truly obnoxious degree of enthusiasm.

I sighed and flopped onto my back, taking my phone with me. Holding it up in front of my face, I stared at it, unblinking.

My regular Saturday alarm would go off in a couple of hours at eight a.m., as it did every Saturday.

This wasn’t a normal Saturday.

This was a very specific Saturday, and to mark the very special occasion about to occur, I’d woken early and set a timer. A countdown, if you will.

Here we go.

Ten seconds left. Nine. Eight…

I watched the screen as the numbers flicked down to zero. The alarm blared.

Well.

That was it. It was over. Over and done with.

I just turned forty.

R.I.P. to my youth.

I slapped the alarm off, hauled the duvet up around my ears, and hunkered in.

* * *

The phoneon my bedside table rang. I ignored it.

After it had stopped and started three more times, I got the hint. Ravi wasn’t going to give up.

I stuck my hand out, dragged my phone back under the covers with me, and accepted the call.

“Happy birthday to youuuuuuu—” he began.

“Ravi, you know I hate that song.”

“Happy birthday to youuuuuu!”

“Stop singing.”

“Happy birthday, dear Benjamiiiiiin!”

“I’m hanging up.”

“No, you’re not. Happy birthday to you! I love you.”

I scowled into the darkness and mumbled, “I love you, too.”

“Aw. Thanks, buddy. All right. How are you doing today?”

“How am I doing? I just summited life, that’s how I’m doing. I’m standing at the top of a mountain and it’s all downhill from here. Obviously, I’m doing great.”

“Ben, are you freaking out?”

“Pfft,” I said. “No.”

“It sounds like you might be.”

And it sounded like he was smiling about it.

I glared at my phone. “I’m not freaking out. Why would I freak out? It’s not as if my life is over. It’s not as if my youth is a memory. It’s not as if I somehow turned into a forty-year-old civil engineer with high blood pressure, enough grey hairs that I can’t even pretend they’re not there anymore, and a mortgage I’ll be paying off until I’m sixty. If I even make it to sixty.”

While I was on a roll and complaining about things, I had also absolutely failed to acquire the loving partner with whom I was supposed to walk into the sunset of my life, hand in aged hand.

From what the internet had to say about what I could expect as a (newly) middle-aged man, that was pretty much it. If I hadn’t found it by now, I’d missed my chance. I should go ahead and resign myself to a life of unending solitude.

“That’s the kind of positive, can-do attitude I like to hear,” Ravi said.

“It’s my birthday. I don’t have to be positive today. I don’t have to do anything. I can live my truth, Ravi. I can lie here in bed all day and be quietly and understandably devastated at the loss of my youth if I want to.”

“You’re not living your truth. You’re having a midlife crisis.”

“I am not having a midlife crisis. How dare you.”

I was definitely having a midlife crisis.

“Mm-hmm.”

“I’m merely standing back, having a good look at my life. Taking stock.” And I was coming up empty.

“Well, you can cut that shit out right now. Don’t stand still and look back. Get up and move forwards! The best is yet to come!”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do know that. This year, Ben? Trust me. This year is going to be the very best year of your life.”

Ravi and his parents had moved in next door when I was three years old, and it was hate at first sight.

My mother, thrilled to discover that the new neighbour had a son only a few months younger than me, had invited Ravi’s mum over for coffee and cake. The unsuspecting women settled themselves on the patio to watch a baby bromance unfold, and instead, toddler war broke out.

Ravi started it.

He was big into monster trucks at that age, probably because he had the personality of one, and the first thing he did was select his favourite, trot over to where I was busy ignoring him and playing with my own toys, and clobber me with it.

As a budding engineer, I was more into construction myself, and I retaliated by upending my bumper-sized bucket of Duplo bricks on his head.

Bricks and trucks were tossed about, teddy bears got involved, hair was pulled, someone got so upset they had a toilet emergency in their Pull-Ups (I say Ravi, he says me) and by the time we were separated, our horrified mothers had made a pact to keep us apart.

They were shit at keeping pacts, because a month later Ravi was invited to my fourth birthday party, we bonded over jelly and ice cream, and the rest was history.

Every birthday since then, without fail, he’d been telling me that this year was going to be the most amazing year yet.

I’d stopped believing him a while ago, but I did appreciate his unflagging enthusiasm.

“God, I wish you were gay,” I sighed. “Why couldn’t you have been gay? We’d have had such a beautiful life together.” Also, Ravi was a trauma surgeon. With the kind of money he pulled in per year, we’d have already paid off the mortgage.

He snorted. “Even if I was gay, you’d kill me in my damn sleep if we got together,” he said. “I’m very demanding in bed.”

I very much enjoyed men demanding things of me in bed. I wasn’t about to tell Ravi that and give him any more ammunition to tease me with. He already had more than enough.

“You’re my soulmate,” I told him glumly.

“You’re really feeling it today, huh?”

“Yes.”

“You’re my soulmate, too. And this year you’ll find another soulmate. One who doesn’t mind giving you a good dicking.”

“You are so crass sometimes,” I said. “I was being meaningful, and you made it about dicks.”

Under his boisterous laughter, I heard a soft murmur.

“Ravi,” I said through gritted teeth, “please tell me you’re not pep-talking me through my very personal midlife crisis with one of your girlfriends lying there listening.”

“Oh, now it’s a midlife crisis?” he said. There was another murmur. “Right. Ben, Lizzie would like you to know that she’s not stupid enough to be my girlfriend, she’s just using me for sex because she’s out of batteries and couldn’t be arsed to go to the twenty-four hour garage for more last night, and she’ll see you—hah. Soon. She’ll see you soon.”

Not if I saw her first.

Lizzie was an occupational therapist who often worked with Ravi’s patients once he’d finished putting them back together. She was the type of organised, practical woman who did an hour of yoga every weekday morning to greet the dawn, and ran marathons at the weekends to relax. I wasn’t ashamed to admit that she intimidated the shit out of me.

“Okay,” Ravi said, “some of us have to work today, so we’d better wrap it up. The people of Oxfordshire and the surrounding counties are out and about, injuring themselves as we speak, and I will no doubt be in surgery most of the day. Are you gonna make it without me?”

“Uh, yes, I think I can manage,” I said, and congratulated myself on how genuinely unaffected I sounded.

Inside, I died a little.

For the first time ever, I wouldn’t get to see him on my actual birthday.

And I knew it was weird for someone of my advanced age to get hung up on, but seriously. For thirty-seven years straight, there he had been, by my side. My emotional support extrovert, my BFF, my ride or die.

All good things came to an end, I supposed.

“See you tomorrow?” I said. We’d planned to meet up in Oxford for a swanky dinner at The Randolph—Ravi’s treat, because I couldn’t afford it. Even if I could, I had better things to do with my money than swallow it.

“See you then. Have a great day!”

“Not likely,” I muttered as he hung up, no doubt to fall on Lizzie like the insatiable animal he was before they both had to get out of bed and save lives and whatnot.

While I hung out at home.

Alone.

Ravi was working over the weekend. My parents had stayed at home in Scotland, and I’d scheduled a trip up to see them next month. I’d made it very clear to Molly the office manager when she cornered me last week that I preferred not to undergo the whole awkward cake-and-cards business, and got one card signed by everyone and a couple of hugs at the end of work yesterday.

Well, I deserved what I got. I’d insisted that I didn’t want a fuss made, and for once, everyone had actually listened.

I clambered out of bed and shuffled into the bathroom, testing my hips to see if they were creaking yet. No creaks. I did a squat, and scowled when my knees cracked on the way up.

Didn’t mean anything. They always did that.

I got into the shower and turned it to as cold as I could stand because I’d heard good things about the anti-ageing benefits.

I lasted about thirty wretched seconds before I turned the dial back up to my usual hot and steamy.

Once upon a time, I”d loved birthdays.

I’d loved the sheer, uncomplicated fun of them—the parties and the presents. More than that, I’d loved the magic of them—the excitement, the possibility, the promise of good times ahead.

I didn’t know when or how it had all faded away.

Although fifteen years of being a civil engineer and twenty years of paying taxes probably had something to do with it.

Being an adult was hard. The older you got, the harder it got.

It was simpler when I was a child.

If this was, say, my tenth birthday, then today would feel very different.

Instead of standing grumpily in the tub under the shower spray with my head bowed like Eeyore, I’d be rushing about getting all excited about my party, about spending time with friends and opening presents.

If I remembered correctly, my tenth birthday was the one when we rented out the ice rink.

I smiled at the memory.

I’d been pretty darned good at ice skating. Ravi had barely been able to stop clinging to the sides, but I’d whooshed around, revelling in the cold air, the disco music, the happy shouts and screams.

And it wasn’t as if I wanted to turn the clock back and be a child again. I liked my independence far too much.

There were lots of good things about being an adult. While I couldn’t think of a single example right now, I knew there were.

It stood to reason that there were also lots of good things about being a forty-plus adult. There was at least a chance that Ravi was right. This could indeed be the very best year of my life.

It was hard to believe, I thought as I sat at my kitchen table drinking my third cup of coffee and beginning to vibrate from the caffeine overload, when every other birthday card I opened—and there weren’t even that many, as most people these days texted—was an ageist joke.

I was seriously side-eyeing the greetings card industry at this point. Someone ought to do something.

Once I’d propped all the cards up on the table and tossed the envelopes in the recycling bin, I swiped through the notifications on my phone, responding to early birthday texts with emojis of thumbs-ups and clinking glasses of champagne.

And then my mother called.

I stared at the screen.

For a craven moment, I considered not answering. A moment only; she was worse than Ravi. She’d keep calling me if I didn’t pick up. She’d get in the car and drive over to check on me, and I didn’t want that. It was three-hundred-plus miles down a busy motorway from my parents’ house in Scotland to my house in Chipping Fairford.

“Darling!” Mum screeched.

I winced when a sharp pop-pop-pop noise went off. “Morning, Mum.”

“That was your father pulling a party popper, by the way,” she said. “Right in my ear.”

I could tell. She was yelling unnecessarily loudly. I turned the volume of my phone down.

“Happy birthday!”

“Thank you.”

There was an expectant silence.

“And thank you for my existence,” I said dutifully.

I’d said it once as a snotty, sarcastic teen, and she’d made me do it every year since.

“I’m so sorry for compromising your pelvic floor. I appreciate the stretch marks, saggy boobs and hollowed-out bones you bear in my service. Etc., etc.”

“You’re half-arsing it, Ben, but never mind. You’re welcome. Now. Are you in bed still?”

“Nope.”

“Good,” she said, sounding enthusiastic and encouraging. It was the same voice she used on all the rescue dogs Dad fostered since he’d retired from being a vet. “Good boy.”

“Mum.”

She sighed. “Ben, I don’t want you to be dramatic about your birthday.”

“I’m not being dramatic. I’m sitting at my kitchen table, drinking coffee, looking at my phone. Very calmly.”

“I was worried I’d have to come over there and drag you out from under your duvet.”

“No need,” I said. “I am resigned. It’s just another day, after all. No biggie. Nothing special happening today. Just one more circuit of this wretched rock circling the sun.”

“Oh, good,” she said dryly. “That lovely cliche. What’s next? I don’t see what’s so great about me not dying for another three hundred and sixty-five days?”

“You know,” I said at her very poor imitation of me, “some people’s mother’s call their offspring, sing happy birthday to them, and hang up. They don’t start by trying to give them a heart attack with party poppers, then get mean and sarcastic.”

“Those poor children,” she said.

I grinned at the phone. “I love you, Mum.”

“I love you too, sweetheart.” There was a brief pause and the sound of someone speaking in the background. “And your father sends his regards,” she added.

Dad was more reticent about expressing his affection but I was confident I could swap out regards for love here. “Thanks, Dad,” I said loudly.

Mum giggled like a girl, then squealed. “No! Barry! This is my phone call, make your own.”

I heard some more giggling as they presumably tussled for the phone before Dad gave up and shouted, “Happy birthday, Benji! We’ll see you?—”

Mum screeched again—I did not want to know what caused that painful and sudden increase in volume, thanks—and said, “Soon! We’ll see you soon, darling. Have a wonderful day. Don’t do anything too wild and crazy!”

I hung up and sat there, listening to the second hand of my kitchen clock tick loudly on in my empty kitchen. Light rain pattered on the window. The bedraggled squirrel in my walnut tree chattered with fury as it kept reaching for and failing to grab a nut.

That bloody thrush was still singing its little heart out.

Wild and crazy?

That’d be nice.

I’d had more than a few wild and crazy birthdays over the years. More than my fair share, even. Ravi had seen to that. I’d been hot-air ballooning over Bavaria, went on an ill-advised pub-crawl in Budapest, bungee jumped in Spain. That had been back in our twenties, though. It was hard to schedule fun around our busy careers—especially Ravi’s, the over-achiever.

This year, I realised, it really was all over. It was the end of an era. This birthday would set the tone for the rest of my life.

It was going to be…sedate.

Instead of flying off somewhere exotic to get bullied into flinging myself off a cliff, or climbing into a basket under a giant balloon to drink champagne two thousand feet above the ground, or even staying local and getting another tattoo on my arse that I’d have to get lasered off a month later, like the regrettable Jurassic Park T-Rex one I got when I was twenty-nine, I had a quiet day ahead.

A quiet, lonely day, most likely followed by an early night with my Kindle, and then the very adult and age-appropriate celebration at a sophisticated restaurant in a posh hotel that Ravi had planned.

I shifted in my chair.

God, it sounded sad.

The second hand ticked on.

Of course, I could always do something wild and crazy on my own. If I wanted to. I didn’t need Ravi to come up with it or organise it.

Besides, dinner at The Randolph? What was that about? He’d taken his mum to dinner for her seventieth.

I didn’t have to sit here and not do anything for my birthday, other than speak to my parents and my best friend on the phone, just because I was regretting the fact that I’d downplayed it too hard and people really were leaving me to mope.

I didn’t have to accept it being sedate.

I could be cool and independent.

I was inventive and imaginative, too. I could be punk about this.

Not too punk, though.

There were limits.

It was far too late in the day to book a flight anywhere and I had to be in the office at nine o’clock on Monday morning. Whisking myself off for an impromptu city break was off the table.

Also, it was Saturday, and everyone I knew was already busy doing their Saturday things. Throwing myself a birthday party, even a small get-together, was out.

I was more of a party attendee than a party thrower, anyway.

I stared out of the rain-streaked window. The squirrel in the walnut tree gave up on stretching for the nut and sat back on its haunches to scream at it in primal rage instead.

I could…?

If not a party, I could do a birthday activity? Hmm. Something solo.

And that thought right there, I would come to realise, was the point upon which my destiny turned.

Because I could have chosen any number of things to do. Things that were meaningful, or self-indulgent or, at the very least, normal.

I could have gone to a spa and paid people to pamper me all day long. I could have caught the train into London and headed to the British Museum to gaze upon the marvels of the Ancient World, and had a revelation about Man and His Complicated Place in the grand scheme of things.

I could have got another dinosaur tattoo on my arse.

I didn’t do anything like that.

I flipped through my mental Rolodex (oh god, I was so old, I knew what a Rolodex was. Never had one, but knew what one was) and reviewed past birthdays, seeking inspiration.

I didn’t have to flip far.

One memory leaped out at me—perhaps because I’d already revisited it in the shower earlier—and the moment I thought it, my heart seized upon it and said: yes.

That is exactly what a totally normal person would choose to do on their fortieth birthday.

It’s cool. It’s edgy. It will rekindle your youthful joie de vivre.

So I got into my car and drove to the ice rink where I’d held my tenth birthday party.

I discovered that in direct contrast to what my memories said, I couldn’t actually skate for shit, I made an idiot out of myself, and I earned a butt-full of bruises with matching ones for kneecaps and elbows.

Oh, and while I was doing all that, I also met the love of my life.

Best stupid idea ever.